Vol. 19, No. 23

March 9, 2000

Students gain behind-the-scenes
perspective on elections

Super Tuesday–it’s the single most important day of the presidential primary campaign. With 1,928 delegates at stake in 22 primaries and seven caucuses spread across 16 states, Super Tuesday can make or break a candidate’s chance to gain the nomination of his or her party in the presidential race. To mark the occasion on campus, a select group of students set up a mock news bureau in 104 Gore Hall on the night of March 7 to monitor election results coming in from Democratic and Republican primary sites around the nation. The staff on hand to chart the results included students enrolled in “The Road to the Presidency,” a joint course offered by the departments of Political Science and International Relations and Communication. The course is taught by Joseph Pika, political science and international relations, known for his research on presidential races, and Ralph Begleiter, UD’s Distinguished Journalist in Residence and a former CNN reporter who covered international politics. As the election results drifted in across four television monitors and through telephone hook-ups to the Democratic and Republican Party headquarters in Baltimore, students and teachers shared their views on the political process and the people who cover it. The road to Super Tuesday for this group of future political journalists, analysts and possible candidates began when Pika and Begleiter decided to take advantage of the fact that it is an election year and the GOP convention is scheduled in nearby Philadelphia. To give students a feel for the excitement of a national election, Pika and Begleiter decided to create the simulated newsroom and send students to various party headquarters in Baltimore and New York City to phone in their reactions to classmates in Gore Hall. “We hope students will truly experience the excitement of the uncertainty of presidential politics,” Begleiter said. “We also hope they will discover the difficulty of predicting the outcome of American elections, as well as the difficulty of figuring out exactly what happened in each state and region. We hope the students will apply their text knowledge of the primary process to the observation of the real thing.” Begleiter, who has covered presidential elections since 1976 and has been to every political convention during the last 20 years, said there are many ways to cover an event like Super Tuesday. Students got a chance to experience some of them, from reporting on site to analyzing exit polls and tracking delegate counts. While some students were watching the election process, others kept an eye on how the media covered of the event. “I think some media do a good job, but most don’t,” Begleiter said. “Most voters don’t even see most of the coverage, good or bad.” The role of the media has evolved as more states have moved their primaries and caucuses to an earlier date. “In recent years, things have become more complex, with many states holding primaries on the same day, so this means that candidates have had to make strategic decisions on where to campaign,” Pika said. “Another effect of this front-loading of primaries by more states is that candidates have to rely more heavily on the media to get the word out.” “I am learning a lot about the process and keeping up with the twists and turns of the campaigns on a regular basis,” Bradley H. Layfield, a sophomore political science major, said. “I knew a great deal about the current process and its implications, but I have learned a great deal about where the process has come from over the past centuries. The historical context has opened my eyes.” Layfield, chairman of College Republicans at UD, has been active in the Republican Party since he was 14. For Brenda Mayrack, a senior international relations and women’s studies double major, the course has been an opportunity to get credit for keeping up with daily ups and downs of election year 2000. “I like getting credit for keeping up with the political horserace, something I would probably be doing anyway,” Mayrack, who is active in the College Democrats at UD, said. Although “The Road to the Presidency” class has given students from differing political parties an expanded view of the political process, it has not changed their opinion of news media coverage. “The press define important issues by highlighting some and ignoring others.” Mayrack said. “Lately we have heard very much about campaign tactics, like negative ads and push polling, but very little about the issues that really matter to most Americans.” Despite the thrill of being in the position to observe the dynamics of the current primary campaign, Layfield, said that in general his view of the press remains unchanged. “My ideas of the press coverage are about the same as they were when I entered the class,” Layfield said. “Still, it is neat to be in the nitty-gritty of the activity.” As the evening wore on and returns came in, Pika and Begleiter asked students for the latest results and an analysis based on exit polls and categorical information from CNN and the World Wide Web. Keeping abreast with the latest returns and exit polls while simultaneously analyzing the results on a state and national basis gave students a sense of working in an actual news bureau under deadline pressure. “There is a lot of pressure here,” said Mayrack, who was monitoring the latest exit polls. “You have to be ready to reply when you are called on, and you never reply that you don’t have anything to say.” While Mayrack was keeping tabs on the exit polls, Layfield was providing comments on Republican Party results from various areas of the country. “The most surprising thing this year has been the unpredictable nature of the campaigns and the fact that the primary races have not unfolded in the way most analysts had predicted,” Pika said. “Students have learned that this is a real life drama and that the campaign is not following some carefully laid out script.” The “Road to the Presidency” series will continue this summer with a course examining the convention process, “The Republican Convention 2000,” and a fall course covering the final stretch of the campaign, including the November election. The courses are open to sophomores, juniors and seniors. –Jerry Rhodes